Saved by Cities, if We Make Them Livable

I feel compelled to highlight part of a comment posted today by Gary Peters, a professor emeritus of geography and planning at California State University in Chico — about the need to smooth our journey toward being a mainly urban species, and the mixed consequences of inhabiting increasingly “manufactured landscapes.” A prime example is the astonishing sprawl of Tokyo, as seen from space above.

Professor Peters’ ideas relate nicely to a post I’ll be publishing Thursday, along with a Times video report, on efforts to limit congestion in Manhattan by requiring drivers to pay a fee to enter the city center — as is already the case in London, Singapore, Stockholm, and Milan. A great place to explore such initiatives is the blog The City Fix, which I discovered only today.

Working to maintain the quality of city life will be ever more important in the next few decades, both in old established metropolises like New York City, and the explosively growing new cities of the developing world. The “urban age” will be a central focus of Dot Earth (even as I occasionally take walks in the exurban woods, of course).

Here’s what Professor Peters had to say:

…To all who read these pages I would recommend the film “Manufactured Landscapes,” a daunting look at some of what modern industrialization has done to different landscapes, specifically in China and Bangladesh. A reviewer in the NYT described it as “A protracted exploration of the aesthetic, social and spiritual dimensions of industrialization and globalization… raises some significant and sobering questions about the impact that we, as humans, make on our environment.” As Brett Wallach noted, “The landscape is as good as a book to get you thinking.”

We have long been ambivalent about industrialization, seeing in it on the one hand a way of raising living standards beyond the imagination of any pre-industrial population and on the other hand a stark shift in our relationship to planet Earth. By the end of the 18th century, artists and writers in England were well aware of this ambivalence, and many chronicled not just the vast new movements to cities but also the effects of industrialization on both cities and surrounding countrysides.

Before it is too late, we should also give more thought to Edward Abbey’s comment that “A world entirely conquered by technology, entirely dominated by industrial processes, entirely occupied by man and machine, would be a world unfit to live in.” On the other hand, as Brett Wallach noted, “The American Dream has been globalized.”

One obvious example of our ambivalence about economic progress is our view of cities as both dynamic centers of economic activity and places to be left behind as we move to the suburbs, where we at least believe that we’ve returned closer to nature and further from the constant beat of progress. Several years ago a cartoon in the New Yorker caught the essence of our ambivalence. It showed a couple sharing a picnic in a serene meadow landscape with not a sign of other humans or human artifacts in sight. The caption read, “It is a shame that this place is so far from the city.”

As this blog and other venues continue discussions of global warming, its causes and consequences, we would do well also to look at the world around us for clues about where we are headed. Whatever I read about “greening” our world, for example, must be balanced by observations that I can easily make for myself. On the highways into my town, for example, SUVs, RVs, and trucks still predominate. In a nearby town, the “city fathers” right now want to chop up a lovely city park and use part of it for parking.

If we truly are to confront global warming, the approach of peak oil, and a host of looming problems, then, as Lester Brown has suggested, “The challenge is to redesign communities, making public transportation the center-piece of urban transport and making streets pedestrian and bicycle friendly.”

As we begin to make such changes, our cultural landscape will most assuredly reflect them, so balance your reading of blogs and newspapers with your reading of your own local cultural landscape.

I’ll be writing more sometime soon on the documentary Prof. Peters alludes to above. “Manufactured Landscapes” explores the world of extractive and manufacturing industries over the shoulder of the photographer Edward Burtynksy.

You can see a snippet of the film here, with permission of the American distributor, Zeitgeist Films.

Increased urbanization just might help our energy/climate problems as much or more than hybrid automobiles and the like. I’d like to see more data on the issue, but “making public transportation the center-piece of urban transport and making streets pedestrian and bicycle friendly” is exactly right. Let’s do it!

The themes raised by this thread are so important, and so multifaceted, that we have to “figure it all out”, somehow, keeping in mind what is of value in human life, and what human life IS.

People can live, perhaps, and be compacted, more efficiently in urban settings. So, if population growth is seen as an inevitable “given”, the increasing urbanization of the globe will follow. And, as the headline post points out, not all urban settings are equal in terms of their human-ness, comfort, sensibility, efficiency, degree of environmental fit, and so forth.

But, as a matter of degree, humans have to live in their human “elements” to be reasonably sane, healthy, happy, and so forth. Of course, this is all a matter of degree. Humans are fairly, but not limitlessly, adaptable.

While I think it’s great (and essential) to understand the problem, and to develop much more healthy urban settings, and so forth, and I agree with many of the points made in the headline post, I also think it’s vital that we begin to address the problem of growing population. And, I think it’s vital that we understand the impact of different environments on human health, sanity, happiness, and so forth.

I’ve been to New York City and Hong Kong and Tokyo and Mexico City and so forth, some of them many times, and I do not think we should cover the entire world with cities nor triple the size of existing cities. Although I enjoy Tokyo, my favorite memories of Tokyo (aside from the food and people) have to do with the wonderful green gardens and ponds, and the best time I’ve ever had in the area was when I hiked to the top of Mt. Fuji, far from the “maddening crowd.”

I think Gary’s points are great, and the issue is a vitally important one, and we should be thinking about how to create (and preserve) better environments, but I’m still very much concerned with the underlying population (and consumption) problems too.

And, there is always the question asked by Cat Stevens, “where do the children play?”

In the world over 50% population are living in the urban area. Most emission comes from urban area. In the Londan they do not just control the congestion of city to ask drivers pay the fee when they into the city. London used these money to reduce citizens public transportation’s fee. What a good idea, this means to encorage people to use public trasportation. They also encorage people to use electric cars. If you use electric car, you can not pay the fee and parking do not need fee. One person use electric car, he saved $8,000 a year. Also, London estimate citizens houses to make their house more energy efficiency. It can save 65% energy of house. London found their electricity come from other areas, it loses 60% energy. Therefore they set solar and wind energy in the city, useing distribution style electricity supply instand to input electricity from ourside of London. They also use waste to generate energy. London also control the business in the city to cut greenhouse gas emission. Andy I think that how to design the city landscape is important, but more important is how to design the city become low carbon city, or zero emission city.

RE: “A prime example is the astonishing sprawl of Tokyo, as seen from space above.”

Tokyo is an interesting kind of city, maybe worth emulating in this discussion’s regard. I am not someone who enjoys living in large urban cities, but I did live and work in Tokyo for five years in the early 1990s, and I loved it! It never felt like a big city to me at all, and I think many expats there might say the same. Tokyo looks big on the map, and from this photo too, but in fact, it is made up of many small “villages” sited around hundreds of subway and commuter rail stations, so I never felt I was living in a massive urban sprawl. I lived in one village, worked in another village 5 subway stops away, partied in another village 4 subway stops away, and did all my getting around by a wonderful subway and commuter rail system that was clean, on time and convenient to reach anywhere in the city.

I can only hope that as societies mature, they balance their urban and rural landscapes. One of the benefits of urbanization is that doing so leaves (in theory anyway) alot of land to be undeveloped. The Netherlands, for example, is both green and livable despite having a high population density. It’s also a living testament to making an entire country bicycle friendly.

Even New York State pulls this off pretty well, given that it’s home to both Manhattan and the Adirondacks.

Tokyo, on the other hand, is scary. Next time you’re on Google Maps, look at a satellite view of Tokyo and then compare how big the grey area is to anything in the States. “Astonishing sprawl,” indeed.

The video clip reminds me of something I heard on Marketplace a few months ago. A segment during that show’s Sustainability series suggested that there are steps one can take to ensure that the e-goods he or she turns in for recycling here (in the U.S.) don’t end up in China. Do any Dot Earth readers know what those steps are? If so, please post.

Most of our cities are near sea level. Even the cities that are not near sea level are dependent on production infrastructure that is near sea level. Until we have a very good grip on the behavior of ice sheets as their interior approaches 273K, and we understand just how heat is advected into ice sheets, we should not be making long-term plans for our cities. Sea level rise is going to be very hard on our cities.

Changes in Arctic sea ice are indicative of how much the IPCC has conservatively understated the effects of AGW on natural systems. A similar underestimate of ice sheet behavior would have dire consequences for our cities.

Your homework assignment is to calculate how long it would take an “ice free” Arctic Ocean to absorb enough heat from the sun to melt all the ice on Greenland. Hint: You will not like the answer. It is much sooner than you would like to think.

What would Tokyo, London, and NYC be without their subways? How could they seal their subways and utilites against a much higer sea level? Where would the people that currently live in cities live? What would replace the industrial productive capacity of our cities?

I’m not sure what the article’s point was. It alluded to the idea that we shouldn’t pollute, and should do something about the traffic problem, and that these are problems in cities – but I’m not sure what the grander theme was.

Also I couldn’t understand what was in most of the pictures in the movie. Very few had any reference point to give a sense of depth, distance, size, or camera angle.

What if the contrived logic of ideology is “blinding” denialists and naysayers to the virtual mountains of good scientific evidence of global warming?

The astounding, clearly visible, pernicious impacts of human overconsumption and overproduction activities of 6 billion (soon to become 9 billion) human beings upon Earth’s climate and its body of resources are overpowering and soon to be patently unsustainable, I suppose.

How much longer can the relatively small planet we inhabit withstand the colossal ravage being dealt to it in our time by human hands?

The globalization of the American Dream is actually nothing more than a dream, is it not?

Fruits are low in calories and highly nutritional already grown on public places at increasing ratios to face obesity trends. Tree climbing also can be a body exercise for kids harvesting fruits.

Fruits have around four times more water content than cookies and easily satisfy hunger taking less energy. Refrigerators full of fruits easily beat junkies.

In Brazil we are increasing fruit trees in the public areas changing the country to a large tropical orchard. Then, sidewalks, squares, parks, roadsides will be plenty of free fruits bearing appropriate food to fight spreading obesity. Free fruits are protected from the power of the economic system pursuing profitability.

Other countries are invited to join us on a fight against global obesity toward a Public Fructification. Brazil intends to become a developed country without common problems of a superpower.

I live on a farm- very rural. Which means I constantly have to explain that I am NOT “anti-city”. They have good points, no question- and they are also a genuinely inescapable reality. We have to deal with them.

Two problems, though, that I didn’t see mentioned here-

We build them on top of our best farmland, over and over. We’re still doing that, and desperately need to find ways to stop.

And- they are inherently fragile- millions of people depending on everything actually WORKING right- today; and tomorrow. The problems in China right now with their 50-year snowstorms are great illustrations- everything is disrupted, in a positive-feedback fashion. Ice knocked the power lines down? No electricity for trains-> no coal for the power plant-> no electricity… food running short- etc.

Catastrophic disruptions WILL always happen. How do we make cities more robust? Human costs will be terrible if we can’t.

You’ve hit upon the challenge of our lifetimes. Cities are powerful agents of sustainability — just imagine scattering the human impacts of Manhattan or Mexico City across a vast landscape served by extremely inefficient, petroleum-based transportation systems that pack a mighty environmental wallop of their own. Unfortunately, this is the model that most of the United States had adopted for the past half century or more and that we’re exporting to places from Dubai to China.

You couldn’t be more right, Andrew, with the following statement:
“If we truly are to confront global warming, the approach of peak oil, and a host of looming problems, then, as Lester Brown has suggested, ‘The challenge is to redesign communities, making public transportation the center-piece of urban transport and making streets pedestrian and bicycle friendly.'”

By their definition, green cities must be urban — with walkable streets, connected street grids and compact mixed-use development served by transit, plus strategically located parks and green space. There is simply no other sustainable way to handle human populations in the era of global climate change.

The US must work both to adopt the model of green urbanism and then undertake the difficult task of exporting it globally. For better examples of sustainable urban development from around the world — including cities in China, India, Angola, Guatemala — check out the archives of the Charter Awards from the Congress for the New Urbanism.

By the way, Doug Farr’s Chicago architecture firm has designed more platinum-rated green buildings (3) than anybody and his focus these days is sustainable neighborhoods and sustainable communities, as reflected in the new LEED for Neighborhood Development rating system. See Grist:http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2006/10/12/shaw/

It’s not really hard to imagine that we could have it all. The description of Tokyo as a large group of urban villages connected by transit shows the way, but Tokyo itself misses the other piece: green infrastructure around the villages. The old Garden Cities scheme is still the greatest hope, albeit one that is not necessarily at the right scale. In Houston, for instance, we have so many rivers, bayous, creeks, and streams that it’s easy to see how green infrastructure could wind around and through dense urban villages of many sizes and scales. Not easy to do, but easy to imagine. Just look at the Netherlands in Google maps and realize it’s a very successful economic model as well, and has a very high quality of life.

“The challenge is to redesign communities, making public transportation the center-piece of urban transport and making streets pedestrian and bicycle friendly.”

Steve F. is spot-on:

Agglomeration of people, talent, parks, transit, and well-designed sustainable urbanism in our cities are what will allow Wyoming to remain Wyoming, the Smokies to remain the Smokies, and farms to remains farms.

Remaking our built environment in the face of changing demographics that trends towards smaller households, fewer marrieds, and more empty-nesters will be one of the great challenges of our time.

Pinning our hopes on a shift from 25 to 35 mpg will result in incrementalizing ourselves to death. It’s been shown recently that not only will our increases in driving overwhelm efficiency improvments — but also that simply building more well-designed, walkable, accessible, convenient, sustainable places will do so much more to reduce our emissions output and fuel consumption than the greenest car that Detroit or Toyota can turn out. (Oh, and those places are in high demand. Which is part of the reason they can be so expensive!)

Here’s our chance to meet the unmet demand for walkable, bikable, train-able neighborhoods, while setting an example that can carry us into the next 50 years as the oil disappears and the allure of the far suburbs wanes.

This blog post reflects the sad state of education in this country: the history of American cities since the late 1800s has included vast, drastic attempts to improve the living conditions of inhabitants, to create accessible parks, and to improve the quality of life for city dwellers by reducing pollution. The idea that we confront these problems anew, and can congratulate ourselves for at last recognizing these problems, ignores the enormous body of work that confronted, and in many cases solved, these problems. Read more books and fewer blogs.

If this country wants to solve its sprawl problems, it should incentivize the re-population and re-capitalization of its cities. Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, etc. were all abandoned by white people with the encouragement of reactionary business and political interests– see the “Power Broker”. Land developers and militarists steered federal money away from the cities and into the vast “land of unlikeness”– see “Flawed Giant”.

Now the bill for this evil has come due, paid in nihilism, ignorance, and the “southernization” of culture. People left the majesty of Chicago or Philadelphia for feel-good TV and military-voyeurism.

If you want to solve the city problems you must move BACK to the cities and vote against the bigots and the Reaganites. If you think this is nostalgia look at pictures of Market Street in Philadelphia from the 1930s– the place looks like Times Square, with hundreds of thousands of people living and working in high density. There was dignity to that life, if nothing else. See “Augie March”. Now we cannot organize, we cannot converse, we can only admire the bankers and nod in agreement when we are told that there is no better way. See “Ravelstein”.

Are you kidding, move back to the cities.
Do you have any idea how much real estate is in the cities. As for we cannot converse with each other, well I think this blog internet thing might start to catch on.

This blog, the comments that come with it, and the general attitude that continues to permeate throughout this destructive culture that somehow cities can be made sustainable is one of great hope.
Hope says it all, as this culture grasps onto a destructive way of life with no consideration for the natural world other than an idea that part of it can remain as a temporary escape from the city ocassionaly. This idea of hope is based on the fact that technology, and science will somehow come up with the answers to solve all of the problems, and they won’t. Alternative energy is a joke, which doesn’t take into account anything other than the fact that they burn clean as the so-called environmentalists want to believe that the only problem that exists today is global warming (nevermind the other problems exist, nevermind that mining is ruining our world as well, nevermind that cell phone towers are killing between 5 and 50 million migratory song birds every year or that dams are killing the salmon off, no none of this matters apparently).
This civilization cannot be made sustainable, it is by its nature unsustainable and is killing off the natural world, this Leviathan will not stop its destruction of the natural world simply because we develop wind power or solar power (both of which require mining of finite resources). It is more than just global temperatures rising, if you look around and open your eyes you can see a whole war against the natural world taking place which will not stop just because of alternative energies.
The air, water, and food are poisoned, radiation is in the air we breathe as is pollution. What is alternative energy going to do for the fluoride that has been put in the water supply? Recycling although it does lessen the destructive impact we are having, still does not solve it as it too requires energy which is not sustainable. This whole way of life is based on an unsustainable relationships with the natural world. You have agriculture which is killing the oceans, our forests are being cut down, we have exceeded our carrying capacity, and this whole civilization is at war with the natural world (as every civilization is). These reformists techniques will not work, it is time that civilization be killed before it kills us. This culture is destructive, and the problem lies far deeper than the NY Times wants to address. It isn’t just an environmental problem that we face, it is this whole civilized way of life that is inherently unstable and deadly. Our way of life is based on violence, this will not change by electing a new President or a new Congress, this government is corrupt as all governments are corrupt. With that, who is even willing to accept the fact that there should be a government? What gives anyone the right to rule over another human being?
Even if this civilization was able to be saved, what is worth saving? All of this alienation which we see day to day? We are addicted to civilization and too withdrawn to understand the effects of it. We are slaves so long as this Leviathan exists. We are domesticated just as the common pet is. For all of the technology created, we just face more isolation and alienation, and the common behaviors which the population at large would like to assign the label of them being “immoral” too (such as murder, rape, abuse, alcoholism), continue to rise. What is the purpose of our daily lives in this world? We do not live, we merely exist, working away for someone else’s profits so they can get richer, so there can remain this concept of rich and poor. Our work itself is not neccessary, it exists to keep the system “progressing” and running. What are we wanting to keep? The hierarchy? The war? Electricity for all of these technological devices which continue to poison our air, and water, and bring up new ways for us to kill each other? The diseases which continue on as a result of industrial civilization? Shall we continue on with more people getting diagnosed with cancer and diseases such as Parkinsons disease? Millions die from cancer every year alone, tens of thousands are dying from car wrecks every year, and this is hardly touching the surface of the other cruel deaths that people meet as a result of this way of life (how about on the job accidents? What a great reason to die early in life). Regardless of what this Leviathan tells us to keep us believing its lies, life before it was peaceful, and one that wasn’t at war with nature as this way of life is. Our lives are mediated to us, and they have no real worth.
Our seperation from nature has brought forth our own oppression and misery, it is time that we stop the ideas that we are seperate from the wild, and start to go back to a feral existance. This perceived divorce from the natural world has dangerous implications which must be looked at. What is so important to keep that we must threaten the natural world and the other species which exist on it? This idea that we can control nature is arrogant and presumptuous, and for all of the ideas of scientists that they can replicate nature, they haven’t succeeded yet in being able to replicate the natural, and only created more problems in the end. We need to look beyond our material comforts and possessions to realize that our way of life is destructive. Our arrogance that no other species matters but the human species ignores the fact that we rely on these other species to survive. Your science is more than likely responsible for the fact that the honey bee’s are being killed, something which we cannot survive without.
While you all would like to stick out your hopes on the fact that something will come along to save us, your hopes get us nowhere. Hope doesn’t save the bears, it doesn’t save the salmon, it doesn’t save us or any other species. Standing out on the street with a candle as a protest will not solve the problem. You want to keep your cities, what gooes will those cities be if you can’t breathe the air or drink the water? If you can’t go outside what good does it do to have your cities? You await something that will come along to save you, but you don’t know when and if it ever will. The fact remains that civilization will crash, we can talk about living in “sustainable” cities for the next decades all we want, but this way of life will not continue, the natural world will not allow it, and it is time we look towards bringing forth the crash as soon as possible, for the sooner we bring it forth, the less harsh it will be.

At least for me, your exchange of valuable perspectives on the human condition (#19 and #20), dramatizes some of the profound implications of the multi-faceted, human-induced predicament that could to be confronted by the human community in these early years of Century XXI.

The cheapest way to deliver power is to put up a bunch of wood poles and string lines. The lines are at risk the moment they’re strung up. A better long term approach, and one that’s more expensive up front is to bury the lines. That means we don’t spend money on crews to repeatedly mutilate urban trees who are unfortunate for their having been planted near power lines.

It also means that a heavy wet snow doesn’t bring down lines and high demand doesn’t cause lines to get hot and sag in the summer.

It’s a pet peeve of mine. Especially considering my family was out of power for 4 days last summer after a wind storm took down power lines all over the suburbs of Chicago. Of 300,000 initially out of power, we were in the last few hundred to be restored because our outage was caused by our tree dropping a branch on the line to our home. We haven’t been able to get the utility to consider burying the line, even though it will again be taken out if we get another heavy wind.

Our super-rich, excessively powerful and obscenely privileged leaders reassure us daily that we are on the “right” track and that we are not pursuing a “primrose path” to the future, so please forgive for asking an impertinent question.

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By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to pass nine billion. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. Dot Earth was created by Andrew Revkin in October 2007 -- in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship -- to explore ways to balance human needs and the planet's limits.